First chance to really play with the CI tool today in a  partially pre-convective environment. Attempted to grab a gif, but it moves a little too fast. I’ll attempt to write through what I’m seeing here anyways.

At the beginning of these frames the CI tool grabs onto a series of storms across far western NY around 15:15Z. These storms fire and immediately move into north central Pennsylvania Probs with these were roughly 86 to 60%. Good job.  Once the storms fire the CI tool lets go of them almost immediately.

focus then shifts south to 1745Z-1815Z where the colors on the CI then begin to resemble a bowl of fruit loops.  We even get a 91% at 1815 over southeastern Pennsylvania that is moving into th New Jersey and the Delmarva.

This tool seems very good for the synoptic level viewing…. but maybe less so on the mesoscale, as there seems to be a lot of noise above  probability of about 40%. The fact that it leaves fired convection behind and moves onto the new area of interest rapidly might make this tool more useful to SPC than to a WFO by redrawing the attention away from the current convection and towards the next problem area. This could help break a natural psychology problem where/when a forecaster would want to obsess over the current convection and may neglect other developing areas for it. .

Also I would like to add that a graduation of the color on the scale may be better than the current discrete 10% breaks built into the color bar.  I noticed that Percent probs were in increments smaller than 10%. This may help to focus the fruit loop bowl effect more. then again it may not but its worth a try.

Grant H.

Looking at the CI product from GOES-E and it appears to have a marginal handle on the CI ongoing over western KY at the moment. In the loop below the values before CI only reached 45% before a 35 dbz echo was detected by radar. In the last frame of the loop there is a 64% noted within the line of CU, though this has not developed on radar. It will be interesting to see if there is soon higher reflectivitiese in this area.

-JB

Today again appears to be a day where the NearCast model is being degraded by a significant amount of cloud cover over the CWA. I have loaded the difference in theta-e fields from the GFS model to fill in some of the gaps in the model. This appears to do well as a proxi for areas of convective instability in the NearCast model. Using the model difference fields in conjunction with the NearCast can help to fill in areas and allow you to get an idea if the model has a good handle on the situation and provides confidence for later in the day.

-JB

I was analyzing the NSSL-WRF simulated satellite versus the actual IR satellite and as you can see it is missing the cirrus cloud deck over the VA peninsula and eastern VA.  It also is missing the cirrus cloud deck over eastern West VA which may hamper or at least slow convection start today.

In one hour it is trying to already form storms over parts that are covered by the cirrus blanket so I wonder if this won’t happen since it hasn’t accounted for it. We shall see. ~ Vollmar

While looking at the 5 KM derived radar reflectivity from the OUN-WRF in order to diagnose strongest cores aloft for the greatest hail potential, I noted a particular item of interest in northern Lincoln County, Colorado.  The reflectivity core clearly splits, which gives us an indication of expected storm tendency.  We can expect that splitting will occur which will place an emphasis on hail with the left moving storm and all modes of severe weather with the right moving storm.  The right moving storm eventually seems to gain a definitive supercell structure in Kit Carson County.  Such a storm would likely be the highest tornado threat in eastern Colorado today.

– JRM

Was comparing the simulated satellite to observations to attempt to get a handle on the pre-convective environment. It appears that the simulated satellite today is to quick in developing convection from southern KY into TN. It also is not handling the convection that is developing over eastern KS well. Finally it has convection developing over southwest KS that is not there in reality. This lowers the confidence in the forecast of this model for later in the day.

-JB

Excitingly, we’ve switched over to a region that is covered by GOES-14 SRSOR, so I pulled up the visible imagery and overlaid the overshooting top detection product. Interestingly, we noticed a very slow-moving storm in south-central AMA’s CWA that erupted on vis satellite and consequently, the OTD picked up on it. Additionally, a weak but still present enhanced V was observed with this storm on SRSOR’s IR imagery.

Now to center on LUB, I overlaid SPoRT’s Flash Initiation Density product on KLBB 0.5Z and observed an increase in the initial density as a cell merger occurred in northern Lamb County, TX. This increase was evident for a few minutes and then simmered down. What’s particularly important is that the SPoRT data, since it is coming in every minute, indicated this “jump” before the next volume scan came in on radar.

In the next loop (below), I did a similar setup with 0.5 reflectivity, SPoRT’s Flash Extent Density product, and included a 1-minute CG lightning plot as well. As anticipated, flash density responded similarly to the cell merger by showing an increase.

At around the same time, WFO LUB received wind/wind damage reports in the area.

Having the 1-minute total lightning data was very helpful in being able to see the response of the cell merger and give a couple minutes more lead time to anticipate what was to come. While CGs can provide great information, having total lightning to get a better idea of what is going on is exponentially more valuable.

~Linda